1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image processing apparatus and image processing method, and more particularly to an image processing apparatus and image processing method for extracting a human subject from an image to apply image processings such as a beautiful-skin processing to the human subject.
2. Description of the Related Art
In human photography, since a face is the most noticeable portion, the face of a person must be properly reproduced in the output image. Thus, there have been made various proposals for applying image processings (image corrections) such as a beautiful-skin processing to an image including a human subject and thereby reproducing the skin of the human subject so that it looks beautiful.
For example, there is known an image processing apparatus which automatically identifies an area to be processed for image correction, e.g., a human image area in the image including a human image and applies image correction processing such as a blurring processing only to the specified area, so that the area including the background is prevented from blurring in the human image blurring processing (for example, refer to Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2004-303193).
Also, for example, there is known a picture image processing apparatus which detects a human face area from inputted original image data, extracts skin information corresponding to the detected face area, detects a skin area based on the extracted skin information, and applies a sharpening processing or a granularity suppressing processing to the detected skin area (for example, refer to Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2006-11685).
Also, for example, there is known an image processing apparatus which includes: a determination device which extracts areas of a face and its organs from an image to be processed and determines a removal processing area obtained by removing the organ areas from the extracted face area; a detection device which detects an image to be removed in the removal processing area; and a removal device which updates the values of pixels of the image to be removed, based on the values of pixels around the image to be removed and thereby removes the image to be removed, whereby image portions such as moles and pigmented spots are automatically removed without causing image quality degradation in the image of the face organs (for example, refer to Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2006-18467).
Also, for example, there is known an image processing apparatus which includes: an image acquisition device which acquires image data from a recording medium having recorded thereon image data; a face area extraction device which extracts a human face area from the image data acquired by the image acquisition device; an image feature quantity calculation device which calculates an image feature quantity of the face area extracted from the image data by the face area extraction device; a correction effect presumption device which presumes whether or not a correction effect is achieved when the characteristics of the image data is corrected based on the image feature quantity calculated by the image feature quantity calculation device, and outputs a first presumption result; and an image correction device which, when the correction effect presumption device presumes, as a result of the first presumption, that a correction effect is achieved, corrects the characteristics of the image data based on the image feature quantity and outputs the corrected image data, whereby the image data is automatically corrected to output the human image having optimum characteristics (for example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2004-62651).
However, according to the above conventional art, when the processing such as the area detection fails in the middle of the image correction processing, a proper processing corresponding to the failure may not be performed.
There is also a problem that it is difficult to properly perform a processing such as modification of correction degree depending on the position of a human subject in an image.